


Dawn

by HiddenTohru



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-07
Updated: 2010-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-11 14:21:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiddenTohru/pseuds/HiddenTohru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not long after the shocking events of "Awakening", Laeti is still wracked with nightmares about the choice she was forced to make.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in March 2010.

She can smell the burning again. It always begins like this, the smell of hellfire lashing at the walls of the city. Stone should not burn so easily, she thinks, as the walls bend and slash in the heat waves coming up from the fire. The screaming has begun now, she hears it, women and children who are flailing as they're burned alive, cursing her name as their eyeballs boil and their tongues explode. She is inside the city now, somehow, and she sees the Reverend Mother, a charred skeleton with a Chantry pendant melted into her chest. She points a blackened finger and opens what was once her mouth, as if to denounce Laeti's crimes, but all that comes forth is a long, high shriek, as of steam escaping a boiling kettle.

Darkspawn with the faces of her friends and companions writhe in agony around her, gurgling incoherently as they burn and melt and their blood boils inside their veins, twitching and screaming as their nerves are burnt off. The tears on her face are flowing as thick and slow as old blood.

One of the guards approaches, only half-charred, his face melted and burnt off on one side and disturbingly whole on the other. He asks her, in the voice of Justice, why she has perpetrated this crime. So many innocents are dead and dying, along with the monsters she sought to slay, and she has no answer for him. She cannot speak, only weeping as she witnesses their deaths, over and over.

Somewhere, deep in her mind, she knows that this is a self-inflicted punishment. She has shaped this nightmare herself, to remember this awful event, to relive it over and over in her dreams. But in that same place, deep within herself, she knows that she deserves it. For all the innocent blood she spilled on that one night, she deserves to suffer. She raises her head to watch the sky as the flames burn ever higher, and the sun turns red as if it, too, is burning.

\-----------------------

Alistair shakes Laeti for the third time, and this time her eyes snap open, wild and searching, her hair in damp tangles around her face. She almost struggles, but realizes she's awake now and goes limp with a defeated sigh.

"Another nightmare?" He pulls her into his arms, cradling her gently, and she clings to him, inwardly renewing her private vow that he will never be allowed to leave her side again.

"The same as last night, and the night before. The burning of Amaranthine. Honestly, I miss being jolted awake by the Archdemon calling its horde. At least then I knew it would end eventually, but this... I may never stop thinking about it, and what traps the mind lays when we enter the Fade." She shivers, then, thinking about never again having sweet dreams, only darkness and fire and the writhing corpses.

Alistair tightens his grip on her. "It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have saved Amaranthine and Vigil's Keep both. I wish I had been there with you."

"Couldn't I have, Alistair?" She wrenches herself free of his tight embrace to lean back and look up at him, desperation in her eyes. "I slew the Archdemon. I found the Urn of Sacred Ashes. What was keeping me from saving both the city and the Keep? I've never managed to not set things right, even thought sometimes I didn't do as well as I could have..."

"I think 'The Hero of Ferelden" is starting to buy into her own press." He gathers her in close again, tucking her head under his chin and caressing her back. "You're an elf, not a goddess. Yes, you have done amazing things. But there's no way you could have salvaged that situation any better than you did. People were going to die, no matter what, and you had to make the incredibly difficult choice of who it would be. I don't think I could have done that, in your shoes."

She presses one of her hands against his chest, feeling his heartbeat through her palm and imagining what it would be like if he had been inside that city. There were so many who would never see their loved ones again because of her. She did not care that those who didn't know her thought she'd done it as an act of revenge (it had been so long since she had wanted any kind of revenge for what had been forced upon her two years ago that the idea was simply ridiculous now). She did not care that much of the money that should have gone to further recruitment efforts and restoring the Keep was going to rebuild the city she'd burned. But there were many who would never feel a heartbeat close to them again. She closed her eyes, the tears creating tiny stabs of pain in eyes already raw from crying. If she never stopped having nightmares of that day, it would be no more than she deserved.

Alistair begins to hum quietly as she breaks into quiet sobs, and wonders how far away the dawn will be.

 


End file.
